LIE HARDER. Rudolph Giuliani's pals at the National Review are worrying about him. After a June GOP debate, Rich Lowry said, "If any pro-choicer can win the Republican presidential nomination, it's Rudy Giuliani. His abortion answer was bad, but what people will remember is his joking around about getting struck down by lightening during it." Apparently Lowry now thinks the lightning is getting closer:

Over the weekend, Giuliani went to Florida to try to relaunch his campaign with a speech focused on his forward-looking “12 commitments” as president. He didn’t mention the one about reducing abortions... Huckabee’s rise shows that social conservatives are still animated by their traditional issues, and Giuliani has little to say to them.

Meanwhile Giuliani spoke in Durham, New Hampshire, apparently hoping to pick up a little ground in an early-primary state he'd taken for granted (he's only now opening an office there). The result was predictable. "At Durham Event, Former Mayor's Swagger Is Gone," reported the New York Sun. Giuliani told local reporters, while pledging fealty to the Second Amendment, that he "used the gun laws aggressively in New York" because "I had to" and "it worked well." A gun-owners' group official sniffed, "If Giuliani's gun control agenda was really limited 'only' to big cities, that would be disturbing enough..."

Clearly his big-city rightwing friends had earlier advised him well to finesse these issues while on the hustings. In the lovely Live Free or Die town of Durham, pop. 12,664 -- the lead news item of its website currently states that "The chiller tube replacement" at Churchill Rink "is complete, there is a good foundation of ice, and the rink is now OPEN" -- Giuliani might have done better to explain that as Mayor he ruled over eight million snarling degenerates much like the ones his auditors saw on TV cop shows, and had he not disarmed them, they might have murdered him and his ex-family. Self-defense is an argument they would have understood.

Likewise, when Giuliani talked to the L.A. Daily News about his bizarre Pat Robertson endorsement, he shouldn't have just said Robertson believed "I would be the best in appointing judges" and left the abortion angle hanging. He should have brought and fingered a scapular, or perhaps a rosary, and denounced the slaughter of millions in the womb. Had the News reporter tried to pin him to policy specifics, he could have talked about his close personal relationship with Jesus Christ. That usually shuts them up.

Given that he competes against world-class fraud artists for the nomination, and isn't such a stickler for truth himself, I don't know why Giuliani hasn't dropped this "what you see is what you get" routine yet. Maybe he's waiting for Easter, or Super Tuesday week.